Facebook under Denial of Service Attack, confirms AnonSec

On the afternoon of January 25, 2012 around 5:30pm Pacific Time, the world's largest social network underwent a Denial of Service attack and service outages were reported in several countries.

It appears that the attack was widespread and lasted for at least twenty minutes, which is roughly equivalent to 3 weeks worth of information downtime in the Internet world and must have particularly annoyed a few social media addicts. Nevertheless, AnonSec has officially confirmed that the site underwent a Denial of Service Attack on its official Twitter account.

Facebook keeps track of its own API errors on its Platform Status Page, and we can see based on the graph below that the site experienced significant API responsiveness delays around the 5:30pm PST.

No information is currently known regarding the source behind the attack, and we will be following this developing story closely.